Ask an O.G.

Dear O.G.,

I think driving a stick shift is a total O.G. move and should be respected. My wife says that for me to prefer this “outdated technology” is an “affectation” (her words). What do you think?

John A, Seattle, WA

Dear John,

I have both kinds of car. It’s useful to know how to handle a manual transmission if you ever plan to rent a car in Europe. I also happen to think driving a stick shift is more fun, but it’d be hard to cite that as an advantage to someone disinclined to learn. The important thing is that you mansplain the manual gearshift process to your wife, using terms like “synchromesh” and “double-clutch.” That should get her off the subject so she’ll stop insulting you about your “affectation.”

Dear O.G.,

How are you, a middle-aged white man, gangsta? I can’t believe you call yourself that.

Leslie H, Dallas, TX

Dear Leslie,

The “G” does not necessarily mean gangsta, or even gangster. I wouldn’t even say the “O” is necessarily for “Original.” And the name wasn’t my idea … you should talk to my publisher. (If you can get him to listen to you, I’d love to hear how you accomplished that.) By the way, this is by far the most common question I get. My eyes are rolling as much as yours, believe me.

Dear O.G.,

I’m guessing you’re a vinyl guy, huh?

Amanda T, Los Angeles, CA

Dear Amanda,

Actually—and I hope this doesn’t destroy my O.G. cred—I’ve never owned a record player. I remember a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the ‘70s (outdated even then) that my brothers let me mess around with, but for playing music I had nothing but cassette tapes until I was an adult. CDs came out when I was in high school. The first one I encountered was in my school locker; I was turning the jewel case over and over in my hands trying to figure out what the hell it was when my locker partner happened upon me and burst out laughing. I did buy a CD player when I was in college, but it was to replace the one I borrowed from a pal (so I could play borrowed CDs) which I unfortunately broke. I didn’t start buying my own CDs until my early twenties, but again, that’s not because I ever had records. (Well, I had one: the John Williams score to “Star Wars,” which my parents bought me to play on their stereo.)

Now, if a music lover still has the record player he bought as a teenager, and all his original records, plus perhaps a few select purchases to round out his collection, I’d consider that O.G. But when wealthy people buy modern turntables with multi-layer plinths, decoupled motor systems, and carbon fiber tonearms, and painstakingly replace their CD or MP3 collections with pricey records, that’s more of an epicurean thing than O.G. (Not saying it’s bad, mind you. Just not O.G.)

By the way, if you meant something else by “vinyl guy,” such as attire, you’ve got the wrong guy!

Dear O.G.,

Nothing says O.G. more than a real appreciation for a good wine vintage … am I right? As the oenophile I imagine you to be, what are your favorite harvests?

Terrence H, New Haven, CT

Notwithstanding my very sincere insistence that the G in “O.G” doesn’t exactly mean “gangsta,” I’m really not sure how a fine wine aficionado could be called O.G., even though a respect for tradition is inarguably O. In any case, I’m sorry to disappoint … I don’t know the first thing about wine (though I have tried my level best to fake it).

I’m guessing there’s pretty good overlap between wine and coffee lovers, so I will go ahead and share my opinion about O.G. coffee (even though nobody’s asked). First of all, its polar opposite is the Keurig, which ought to carry as much stigma as chicken nuggets. I consider pour-over to be the best way to make coffee. Until the 1950s it was the main method, but then instant coffee became hugely popular during the convenience-addicted post-war era. That lasted until the ‘70s when cheap electric drip coffee makers became available. Pour-over is becoming more popular, maybe even hip, but I think I can make the case that it’s pre-‘50s O.G. I grind my beans by hand (so I don’t wake up the whole family with the earsplitting noise of an electric grinder), and I use a cone made of porous stone, which isn’t an old technology but sure feels old.

Dear O.G.,

What is your absolute favorite O.G. move, and why?

Far and away the most satisfying O.G. realm for me is using—exclusively—a traditional double-edged razor. This is a product that’s far cheaper than its modern equivalent, does a better job, is better made, looks nicer, and is produced by companies that clearly have no interest in glib, glossy marketing. I’m so fond of my O.G. razor, I wrote an ode to it which you can read here. Thanks for asking!

Dear O.G.,

Getting back to an earlier reader’s question, about music on vinyl: for someone who doesn’t own a record player you sure seem knowledgeable about the modern technology. Do you know whereof you speak?

Keith W, Chicago, IL

Dear Keith,

Not at all, actually. You caught me … I’m a total poseur.

Dear O.G.,

What’s more O.G.: classical art (e.g., Old Masters) or pop (e.g., Warhol, Lichtenstein)? Obviously Leonardo da Vinci was a rockstar, but then, that’s so long ago. Is there an expiration date on O.G.?

Tricia P, San Francisco

Dear Tricia,

I think an endless debate could be had among those two art schools, not to mention all the other ones (e.g., modern, postmodern, contemporary) that would claim they’re the most O.G. I do not want to venture into that fracas. But I think the more important distinction, particularly because so much art isn’t seen in museums, is between human art and A.I. “art” as the latter starts to replace more and more real work, from street fair posters to advertisements to crap you can buy on Etsy. I’m sure you can already sense my position on this; for a full discussion, replete with a drawing challenge I issued to both ChatGPT and my daughter, click here. Suffice to say, A.I. can never be O.G. It’s the antithesis.

Dear O.G.,

I happen to know you’re a veteran cyclist. How does this mesh with your O.G. approach? Do e-bikes, electronic shifting, and disc brakes make you throw up in your mouth?

Robert S, Thousand Oaks, CA

Dear Robert,

I’ll start with your specific examples and then address the bigger picture. I think e-bikes are not only just fine, but probably inevitable for most of us … they may well extend the number of years (and hopefully decades) I can continue to ride. I’m also completely in favor of non-cyclists buying e-bikes for transportation, because even if e-bikes don’t honor the purity of traditional cycling (can you sense my “blah blah blah” here?), they do mean fewer cars on the road. Sure, go on all you want about what a menace these unskilled but fairly high-speed e-bikers present, but I’ll take a 15 mph impact from a 40-pound e-bike over a 25+ mph impact from a two-ton car. (It’s not like e-bikers have cornered the market on roadway incompetence and inattentiveness, after all.) But I will assert two caveats: 1) no kid should ever ride an e-bike (details here), and 2) e-bikes shouldn’t be allowed on nature trails (see here).

Moving on to electronic shifting, I do think it’s a solution looking for a problem, and though I’ve given it two solid auditions (click here and here) the earth didn’t move for me either time. But my next bike will surely have it (it being the new normal), and people seem to like it well enough. Same with disc brakes: I love them on my mountain bike, you can run carbon rims, blah blah blah damn, I’ve even boring myself here.

All this being said, these new road handlebars that flare out, and the goofy brake levers that stick out like chicken wings … they’re hideous. And what’s with the weird fork crowns on BMC road bikes? They look like the fork on a cheap mountain bike! Aesthetics are being sacrificed at the altar of performance and that’s just anti-O.G. So many modern road bikes so dorky, they can even make a guy like Julian Alaphilippe look like a dweeb.

You know who was the O.G. road racer, with a perfect bike to match? Bernard Hinault.

(Don’t even get me started on Jonas Vingegaard’s aerodynamic helmet.)

Dear O.G.,

I think part of being O.G. is just sticking to your guns and not following along with the status quo, like how Eminem won’t use Auto-Tune. Do you live by this kind of credo?

Wanda R, New York City

Dear Wanda,

I think there are two fundamental ways to buck the status quo. You can either observe the conventional wisdom, evaluate it, and decide to reject it—like Eminem—or you can be oblivious to modern trends and just bumble your way along doing whatever seems to work. My favorite example of the latter is my dad, who—despite having been a college instructor in Boulder, Colorado during the late ‘60s—was totally unaware of Birkenstock sandals and, decades later, after failing to observe three huge surges in their popularity, totally thought he discovered them, like they were some obscure thing.

Often I do stubbornly defy the status quo. I think I was the only teenager in Boulder in the ‘80s who didn’t have an earring; I never used Biopace chainrings on any of my bikes; and I eschew all social media (except, begrudgingly, LinkedIn), all in defiance of the norm. But other times I’m willing to follow the status quo but only after considerable delay, out of sheer ignorance. For example, in matters of music, I’ll be barely aware of a band or singer for many years until finally I start to wonder who it is I’ve been hearing, and hearing about, for so long, and then I’ll investigate. I discovered Eminem in 2003 (four years late), Sublime in 2011 (fifteen years late), and The Black Keys in 2023 (twenty-one years late). In the latter cases, I wasn’t defying the zeitgeist … I’d just fallen behind. You might say I was O.G. in the sense of “Oblivious Guy.” (Of course it’s hard to remain ignorant now that we have Spotify. I have a love/hate relationship with it … the ad hoc selections it plays after the end of an album often trick me into listening to really anodyne, soulless stuff for oddly long periods before I suddenly think, “What is this crap!?”)

I wouldn’t say I consider this late-or-never tradition a credo, but it does affect my life. Probably the biggest single effect of finding my own way, without regard to conventional wisdom, was choosing to major in English despite everyone around me (even then) assuring me that with that lowly degree I’d never get a real job. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, as I discuss at length here. (My younger daughter is currently earning her English degree, with minors in Art and Philosophy, and I couldn’t be more pleased.)

As for the day-to-day effects of this approach, a big one is how much I use the public library. I just looked at my loan history from the Berkeley library, and in the last 144 weeks I’ve checked out 289 items (books, movies, CDs), for an average of two items a week. That doesn’t even include what I get digitally through Kanopy, Libby, and Hoopla (details here) and from the Albany Library. In a society that’s thoroughly embraced Amazon, streaming platforms, and video games, I think libraries are 100% O.G. And yet I know plenty of adults who don’t even have a library card.

Dear O.G.,

What’s the point of clinging to all these established ways when A.I. is obviously going to change everything over the next decade or so? Preferences that might seem old school and noble now will just become outdated, outmoded, outmaneuvered, and over. Not to be a dick about it, but I think this has to be said.

Ron B, Atlanta, GA

Dear Ron,

You sound like the blowhards gleefully predicting the demise of printed books based on competition from e-books like the Kindle. Society needs a term for people like you … technophiliac, or maybe digitopian. Look, I won’t deny that A.I. is a powerful tool for making many tasks more efficient, but that’s not a purely good thing. I’m all for ChatGPT helping me with HTML scripting or making DNS routing changes, but its essays are a) inferior to a real writer’s, and b) dumbing people down. The very word “essay” is from the French essai meaning a trial, attempt, or test, deriving from the Latin exagium, a weighing or examination. The point of writing an essay is to explore an idea, create and test hypotheses, and ideally learn from the effort even as you’re crafting something others can read. The point of a teacher assigning an essay isn’t to educate herself on a topic via her students’ papers; it’s for the students to grapple with the difficulty of writing and improve their brains. At least, that’s my O.G. perspective. In a shocking New Yorker article I read recently, a college professor interviewed several students at top universities about their blatant use of A.I. to write papers for them, and the success they’ve had (at least, from a grade perspective) in doing this. Here’s a crazy example:

A sophomore at Columbia studying computer science told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so I just put it in [to an A.I. platform] and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

These students might think they’re pulling a fast one, but what happens when they graduate and still don’t know how to think? How are they going to impress anyone during a face-to-face dialogue—whether it’s a job interview or a cocktail party—when they don’t have ChatGPT to generate insights and pretty sentences for them? No less an O.G. than the rapper Ice-T (whose fourth studio album, “O.G. Original Gangster” helped popularize the term), rapped about the problem of school dropouts trying to sound impressive:

How you gonna drop science? You’re dumb
Stupid ignorant, don’t even talk to me
In school you dropped Math, Science, and History
And then you get on the mic and try to act smart
Well let me tell you one thing, you got heart
To perpetrate, you’re bait, so just wait
Till the press shove a mic in your face…
And they ask you about the game you claim you got
Drop science now, why not?

Notably, he wrote that song in 1989, before an A.I. existed that could enable a useless student to fake his way through school. Sure, modern A.I. can help you get a degree, or program a computer, or write a basic email, but it’s not going to make you an interesting person. Ultimately, thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move.

Dear O.G.,

That last response? And your conclusion, “Thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move”? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s pretty much the cheesiest thing I’ve ever read. I think in your case O.G. stands for “Old Geezer.”

Dana A, Albany, CA

Dear Dana,

I know. You’re right. You got me. I’m tired. I should really edit my stuff before I post. Looks like that pompous, overblown sentiment slipped past my publisher,  too. Sheesh.

An O.G. is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an O.G.,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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